Audiences categorised

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  • Created by: Shadow
  • Created on: 18-11-20 14:43

The Ways in Which Audiences Can Be Categorised

Why do media producers need to categorise audiences?

  • Tailor products to meet audience expectations
  • Meet audience needs
  • To gain to approval of the audience
  • To cater for audience fragmentation

Obvious audience categories are:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Ethnicity
  • Social Background
  • Culture
  • Location

One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show their class, occupation and income. This is called an audience demographic profile, which is particularly important to advertisers and the magazine/newspaper industry.

A Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other highly salaried professionals
B Middle management, teachers, many ‘creatives’ e.g. graphic designers etc
C1 Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff etc
C2 Skilled workers, tradespersons (white collar)
D Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (blue collar)
E Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

Retired people used to be category E to reflect their loss of income, but with the rise of early retirement and lucrative pensions, this group has moved to a higher category to reflect their disposable income and obvious appeal to advertisers.

Young and Rubicam’s Four Cs

A psychometric audience profile defines an audience by their values, attitudes and lifestyles. As the concept of class became less fashionable, advertisers started thinking about audiences in different ways. One of the best-known was devised by the advertising agency Young and Rubicam. This…

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